Kevin Villani

The Political Economy of Environmentalism

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“People, like any creature with no natural predator, will continue to spread beyond the capacity of their environment.”

Should I live to 80, the global population will have increased fourfold in my lifetime, more than double the population when the Club of Rome called for zero growth in 1972. For the average non environmental scientist, it is easier to divide the environment into the original Greek elements: fire, water, earth and air. Fires are currently raging, considered (unscientifically) as evidence of “global warming,” modified to “climate change” when the planet started cooling. Land use is also a serious global problem as the run-off into rivers and oceans is unbounded.

People respond to visual cues: when the Cuyahoga River  burned in downtown Cleveland for weeks, America cleaned up its rivers. When scientists vividly described a hole in the ozone layer, consumers replaced chlorofluorocarbons in cars and refrigerators in 1987 as part of the  Montreal Protocol.

Unlike the Cuyahoga River fire, environmentalism today is rather like the US debt, another intergenerational transfer that also reflects human nature. Current sacrifices can potentially reduce the projected magnitude of sacrifices forced upon future generations, but some economists argue based on UN income forecasts that future generations will be so wealthy  that the high costs we would bear today will be relatively painless in the future, the environmental equivalent of “growing out of the debt problem.”

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The Johnstown Flood

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Pennsylvania borrowed more money to build infrastructure supporting canals than any other state to take advantage of the trade opportunities of the Erie Canal. Construction started on the South Fork Dam in 1838 with scheduled completion within a year, but by the time it was finished in 1852 the railroads had made it obsolete. The state wrote it off and it eventually provided a fishing lake for Pittsburgh’s elite. When it burst in 1889, causing the Johnstown flood, the total loss in life and property was probably 100 times the initial construction cost. Pennsylvania, having long since declared bankruptcy in 1841, blamed the rich.

Most every year the Congress metaphorically dances on top of the earthen South Fork Dam looming over Johnstown with the water lapping at their feet. Their solution is always the same: Let’s throw some more dirt on top this year. We’ll drain it when we drain the swamp, after we eliminate the air pollution in Johnstown, the price paid for the industrial revolution raising American living standards in the late 1800s.

The primary issue facing America during the post WW II era was whether its consumerist economy could continue to produce rising living standards for all, the cornerstone of political legitimacy. The leader of America’s competitor Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union put the issue crudely six decades ago: “we will bury you” with a savings and investment rate several multiples of yours. America’s intelligence community and economic elite were shocked by the sudden collapse of the Soviet economy – like a dam bursting – less than three decades later.

Khrushchev, like most of America’s development economists, understood the role of saving and investment but not how important the private capital markets were to the allocation of capital to its highest and best use, politically directed credit being the main cause of their collapse. In Johnstown everyone knew that the valves to lower the water level in the lake had been removed during the last amateurish reconstruction, but fixing or removing it was opposed by rich land owners. The debt ceiling has similarly proven an ineffective mechanism to control America’s flood of debt, with the central bank standing ready to buy it all to the benefit of the wealthy. American politicians, feeling unbound by constitutional constraints, are addicted to issuing debt, the birthing person’s milk of politics. The Biden Build Back Better Plan  promises to strengthen the dam, but like the amateurish repairs to the South Fork will weaken the dam’s foundation while causing water levels to rise, possibly to a critical level.

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We Need to Talk About Joe

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The fictional mass murderer  Kevin  is most often described as a psychopath and his mother Eva a sociopath in book and movie reviews, the latter defined the same as the former, but without the insanity defense, i.e., a physical brain disorder rather than a choice. President Biden isn’t suspected of any such brain disorder (although dementia has long been suspected, common for his age). But Bruce Cannon Gibney argues that Baby Boomers, those born between 1940 and 1964, are  A Generation of Sociopaths  (2017) based primarily on their over-consuming at the expense of future generations, a massive inter-generational injustice. He allows for exceptions, but not among the Baby Boom political leaders, of which Joe Biden was the first on the national scene.

Sociopaths are defined  as narcissists with additional characteristics, among which are: superficial charm, glib, manipulative, self serving, grandiose, pathological lairs, without remorse, self-centered, untrustworthy, physically aggressive, impulsive, blaming others, lacking in empathy, break promises, an ability to avoid persecution for illegal acts, and a belief they deserve to rule the world. As a result of the Obama/Biden “Good War” over half the current population of Afghanistan was born under American protection. These and thousands of those who assisted the American occupation and their families have been left behind by Joe to meet repression, and, for many, death at the hands of  his captors  and other Islamic radicals. His press conferences revealed almost all these sociopathic tendencies, leaving no doubt as to the applicability of Gibney’s diagnosis.

Like Kevin, Joe is competitive among his sociopathic political peers. For sheer narcissism it would be difficult to top former President Trump, and  the Clintons  are unlikely to ever be surpassed in the team sociopath competition. But Joe Biden,  whose first attempt  to rule the world over three decades ago was thwarted by a plagiarism scandal, seeks to exceed FDR,  the record holder  by size of Mall Monument, as a world leader not on his  foreign policy experience, but by spending his way to a risky  “fundamental transformation”  of the US economy and society. Should we  trust in Joe, or is he  the “Borax Man”  (a soap salesman)?

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Looking Back on the Biden Ten Year Plan

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(An Ode to Lionel Shriver)

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Back in 2021 President Biden reiterated that his proposals, unprecedented in scope and expense, represented an investment in the future with extraordinary returns that could only be evaluated over the longer, e.g., ten- to fifty-year time horizon. This perspective coincidentally facilitated claims it was paid for without new taxes, while postponing an evaluation of actual returns beyond his term in office, even if he should run and win a second term in 2024 at 82 years old.

Saving American Democracy

But it’s now a decade later and Biden is still in office. Well, not exactly in  office, as he had been replaced by a hologram in late 2021, addressing the American people from  his estate  in McLean Virginia, purchased for $50 million cash (before GSA improvements). Following FDR’s precedent people were told that changing leaders in the midst of a crisis, and these continued to accumulate over the decade, was dangerous.

Besides, he had run virtually unopposed in the 2024 election after all those registered Republicans within a half mile of the Capitol on January 6,th 2021 had been arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for “terrorism and crimes against the State,” after which Republican voter registration plummeted.

The expanded Supreme Court, 29 Justices to accommodate race, ethnicity, gender, etc., had finally ruled on the legal concept of “disparate impact,” concluding that everything from global warming and COVID 19 to voter identification, rent collection, college admission requirements and even law enforcement represented illegal racial discrimination. The expanded Court then called an indefinite recess during the construction of a new edifice to house it.

There was really no point in holding a faux election in 2028 in any event. The progressive campaigns to eliminate the electoral college and voter ID laws to prevent “voter suppression” had both been successful, and the ongoing COVID lockdown still allowed mail-in ballots under the rules in place in 2020, so there was no need to go through the motions. The New York Times and the Washington Post, the only remaining Party sanctioned newspapers, simply announced “the will of the people.” By now, 2031, most people have long since forgotten the promises of that Biden Ten Year Plan.

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Biden’s Bogus Chinese Bogeyman: America Should Kowtow Now

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The focus has shifted from the typical initial  totally perverse  justifications for the current unprecedented (historic)  spending plans, e.g., to “stimulate GDP” (a measure of spending) and “create jobs” (work is what we do to consume, not an end in itself) to meeting and defeating the threat posed by China’s expanding economic and military might. This is  precisely the policy  the Chinese would have demanded of their  Manchurian candidate  in return for their billion dollar Air Force 2  Hunter Biden “investment.”

America’s real  casus belli  (Thucydides  provided three in 400 BC, fear, honor and interest) is part fear but mostly economic interest. China after a  seven century hiatus  is once again a rising imperial power following a traditional mercantilist approach of accumulating wealth through trade, simultaneously  accumulating and investing in gold  and a global belt and road  trading system while restoring lost honor.

Why War?

Foreign policy, totally ignored during the 2020 Presidential election, is now front and center, with the Biden Administration,  which initially kowtowed, now beating the war drums louder than did the Trump Administration. War is  a continuation of politics by other means, and the politics among nations generally reflects their imperial interests. America’s Founding Fathers may have been libertarian theoreticians, but their complaints against the King related to the right to exploit America’s vacant land and resources. England may be  “an island of coal surrounded by fish,”  but the Admiralty of the Navy Winston Churchill recognized that England’s control of the seas required conversion to oil and that required control of the Middle East. The landscape had barely begun to recover from the Great War “to end all wars” when the same parties rearmed for the rematch.

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